Ross Davey wrote:
> I am concerned about your perceptions of what went on with Argus in the > process of open sourcing, and what the status is now. > > The only reason for the delay in open sourcing was the process of > evaluating the different open source regimes and the process of > reporting back on the different regimes from legal advice. There was no > reluctance on the part of the 'commercial providers' and the opposite is > quite the fact. We have been the champions of moving Argus to the open > domain and had to fight for some time to gain the full possession of > the IP to do so. The other delay was the establishment of the legal > infrastructure for the ongoing development and support etc. It was > important to get this right. My point was simply hat open-sourcing products that aren't open from the start is complex and can take a long time, as you confirm. I'm sorry I implied it was because of relunctance on your part. > I remain disappointed that we dont get the recognition and support from > the community that we are trying to serve. What would you like? If you want lots of bugfixes and improvements from the community, you need to open your latest version. (you have got some anyway, speak to Syan Tan) If you want "political" support from guys like David Guest, Horst Herb, et al., you need to tackle the "political" question of allowing non-HeSA certificates. If you sit down and do the sums and decide it's not economically viable to do those things, fine. but you can't have your cake and eat it too, in that sense. Unfortunately, the Australian medical IT market isn't highly developed. Most users don't give a rats about linux, open-source or any of those things. They do want hold-your-hand support though, and (in the messanging sphere) they want someone else to pay for it. They don't mind ads, viruses and being locked-in. There's probably only 4-5 GP practices in the country where somebody cares about open-source. Nobody's going to go bust by ignoring this market. I agree that this market isn't really compatible with a pure open-source model, and so I agree the Argus/HOW model is as good as we can expect. The only alternative is a development that is non-commerical initally (like linux) and paid-for support comes later. Ian _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
